Wednesday, December 23, 2009

About a month ago, loyal VCCL reader, eminent game scholar, and beard enthusiast Charles Pratt agreed to have me onto his gaming podcast, Another Castle. If you don't already listen to this podcast, you really should: given the roster of game development luminaries and accomplished scholars that have already been the show the presence of this semidefunct games-blogger is, er, pretty incongruous. Me, I was just pretty psyched to get a free Kirin and appear in a forum whose previous two guests were Eric fucking Zimmerman and Heather fucking Chaplin. Holy Christ!

I really enjoy arguing with Charles, and this podcast is pretty representative of the class of things we like to gab about, such as the nature of reality. Check it out!

Never forget: Somebody invented Tetris. In June of 1984, a new light dawned on the world. Tetris was not a simulation of some extant human activity; when those blocks descended from the top of the well, something theretofore unimagined came into being. Especially in 2009, a year defined by its parade of ocassionally-ingenious incremental refinements, we must celebrate the new. This is no time to cheer retrenchment.

Grand Theft Auto IIIEven now, it is not difficult for me to summon up the wave of awe that I felt on first playing this game. One representative detail is burned into my mind: there were radio stations. Not only could you walk on a street and get into a car, but that car was connected to a wholly fictional radio network. While the later games in the GTA series better achieve the perverse environmental sensibility that the first open-world GTA groped towards, there is no downplaying the fact that that wonder, the thrill of jumping in and out of cars and driving around a populated cityscape, was the maybe the most impressive thing that happened in a video game this decade. All I know is, I wasn't playing much during late nineties, and it was putting this game into a rented playstation 2 in winter of '01 that got me thinking: I should keep an eye on these video games. So, GTA 3 was my personal road to Damascus moment when it comes to computer generated entertainment. Feel free to allot blame accordingly.

Katamari DamacyGod bless Keita Takahashi. Seriously. Katamari Damacy is a game of only one idea. But what an idea! This game would have been revelatory for its wholly unique mechanic and playful manipulation of scale, a work of genius even without the dadaesque sensibility that informed the gameplay: the panicked shrieks of innocent children and livestock, the batshit crazy king in the sky, the continuous splendid parade of visual nonsequitur.

Rock BandTo think: how happy we were in '07 to be onanistically plunking away at plastic guitars. Perfecting our run at Buckethead's Jordan. Make no mistake, I loved that shit. We just didn't know any better. Rock Band wasn't the mere accretion of supplemental prosthetic enjoyments. It took the core pleasure of Guitar Hero, participating in the creation of music, and brought a wholly novel feeling of collective achievement. It unlocked in me a previously unknown, burning desire to croon in a semipublic forum. It added drums. It was the most fun I had with a video game this decade. Just watch the video. Look how happy these people are! And the they are right.

WarioWare: Twisted!I am continually amazed by Nintendo's uncanny grasp of the basic elements of play. When it published its first collection of microgames for the GBA, we confronted a shuffled deck of primordial gameplay elements, sheathed in an absurdist casing and revealed under duress. WarioWare posed a novel challenge to its players: "figure out what this game is! You have three seconds!" Twisted!, the second game in the series, gets the top nod for the way it expanded the number of verbs at hand. Furthermore, physically rotating a gameboy is the way that world 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers was meant to be played.

Boom BloxTo me, Boom Blox is the first and maybe the only Wii game that made optimal use of the gestural possibilities afforded by its hardware. An accelerometer bestows myriad potential actions, and it just so happens that hurling objects with physics at blocks and cubical beavers is the best among them. Layering puzzle elements and a marvelous version of Jenga into this formula only heightens the impressiveness of this seemingly obvious discovery.

World of GooI must admit that I had not given much thought to the gameplay potential of adhesion. The virtual representation of physics was a mainstay of this decade's games, but World of Goo stands apart for the way it devised an innovative game around the pedestrian idea of structural engineering. If that were not enough, the game spins a delightfully indirect yarn throughout the course of the game and continually introduces novel gameplay wrinkles into its basic recipe. As the game develops, you are always doing something new with your brain, and that is a mark of great design.